Black-tailed Prairie Dog

Black-tailed prairie dogs are heavy-bodied ground squirrels of the shortgrass plains east of the Rockies, tan to pinkish-cinnamon with a whitish belly, big dark eyes, short rounded ears, and the black-tipped tail that names them. They live in towns divided into family groups called coteries — usually one adult male, a few females, and their young — and a town is as much heard as seen: a sentry on the crater-like rim of a burrow barks at anything suspicious and everyone dives underground, while the jump-yip, a stretch to full height with the forefeet thrown skyward on a shrill yip, ripples from one animal to the next. They graze the grass around the colony short enough that nothing can sneak up, take their water from the plants themselves, and once numbered in the hundreds of millions before farming, ranching, and plague reduced them to a small fraction of their former range.